Arthur Hugh Clough — An Appreciation

Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin

Among Victorian readers, Clough was best known for his earlier, short poems.
His most famous was "Say not the Struggle Nought Availeth," which he wrote
in support of the fighters in the revolutions of 1848. For later Victorians
and for twentieth-century readers, however, his most important works have
been the products of his struggle with his religious doubts — indeed he is
for many the representative Victorian Doubter. Because his best poems
("Dipsychus", "Amours de Voyage", and "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich") are
relatively long and either unfinished or of uneven quality, the selection in
the anthologies is not very representative. It emphasizes one
characteristic (which is nevertheless an appealing one), his sardonic wit.

His long poems clearly refer to his own intellectual state: the heroes tend
to be isolated and alienated, and only in the earliest ("The Bothie") is he
able at the end to make a fulfilling connection with another human being.
When Clough died he was at work on a long episodic poem, Mari Magno,
structured like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but there is reason to
suspect that he had come to a halt on that work as well. Many of these
later poems made experiments in poetic language, subject, and poetic
structure many decades ahead of their time, and his portrayals of a divided
modern consciousness had major influence upon T. S. Eliot and other
modernist poets.

Clough's loss of religious belief after he left Rugby is undeniably the
central fact in his life. Very likely he was unable to complete his long
poems for the same reason that he was unable to achieve the other great
things expected of him: when he lost the direction which Dr. Arnold's moral
earnestness had supplied, he lost his sense of purpose in life.
Nonetheless, Clough produced some first-rate, pioneering poetry that has
only recently begun to be appreciated for its daring modernity. Even Matthew Arnold, his close friend who long shared many of the
same spiritual dilemmas, did not fully appreciate Clough's
achievement — possibly because it so threatened his own attitudes towards
life and literature.

Leading Questions

What effect does learning that Clough wrote important poetry have upon your
understanding of "Thyrsis," Arnold's long-delayed elegy for his friend?